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By Root 2608 0

in wireless technology, establishing reliable and secure agent communications from behind enemy lines proved very difficult indeed. In the meantime, Cumming’s progress in establishing the new ‘S.S. Bureau’ was embodied in a report he prepared in April 1910 covering its first six months of existence. After a slow start, he said that since December 1909 the work had ‘increased rapidly until at the present time I have as much as I can tackle’. He described how his ‘staff of agents’ was ‘of two kinds’. In the first place were those watching Germany who were simply ‘expected to keep a good look out for any unusual or significant movements or changes - either Naval or Military - and report them. From these agents’, he added, ‘“no news is good news” and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it is to be believed that they are doing their duty and are earning the pay they receive.’ The other agents were ‘those who in addition to giving warning of extraordinary activity on the part of those they are deputed to watch, are expected to collect information of all kinds and forward it to me at stated intervals’. As yet, he was unable to make any firm judgment about these men ‘as sufficient time has not elapsed since their appointment to enable me to form an opinion’. The ‘principal Agent’, B, was paid nearly £1,500 (equivalent in modern terms to about £110,000) for himself and three sub-agents, about whom Cumming knew nothing whatsoever. ‘I have never seen them’, he remarked, ‘or heard their names, and I am not by any means certain that they exist at all.’ In April, after a trip to Paris to meet B, Cumming (revealing that the peculiar world of intelligence was beginning to affect his thinking) confided to his diary doubts about the existence of B’s sub-agents: ‘I could not feel absolutely sure that he had three men in his employment at all, although perhaps this is only the suspicion that grows upon one after the first few months of this work.’

B was a problematic asset in other ways too. As Cumming noted in his April 1910 report, he was ‘a foreigner, a potential enemy (for he is an Austrian) and a professional spy’. On the other hand, he was ‘intelligent’ and had evidently ‘rendered good service in the past’. In February he had supplied detailed dimensions of the new 25,000-ton German battleship Thüringen, which B had acquired from a naval engineer in Bremen, and which the Naval Intelligence Department was pleased to have. But, on the whole, the reports supplied from B’s network were ‘very meagre’ and did ‘not up to the present justify the large salaries paid - more than is paid to all the other Agents put together’. B, argued Cumming, had ‘no incentive to send in good reports, as he is paid the same whether they are good or bad’, and he wanted to change the system to one whereby the agent would still be paid ‘a fairly large retaining fee for himself ’ (though clearly less than he was currently receiving) with further sums ‘on a liberal scale for all information supplied and approved’.

Reviewing his other agents, Cumming recommended that WK should be retained at a salary of £200 (equivalent to £15,000), ‘to rise to £240, if he gives satisfaction’. Normally based in Germany, WK had reported in December 1909 about torpedo-boat trials in the Baltic and off Wilhelmshaven, and on naval construction, including submarine work of which there had been a particular concentration so that ‘this branch of the Navy’ might ‘render valuable service in time of war’. In April 1910 Cumming sent him to the Austro-Hungarian ports of Trieste and Pola (now Pula) to investigate naval shipbuilding. WK’s report, limited somewhat by the fact that he had ‘no technical knowledge’ of warships and ‘had been much troubled by the police at P[ola]’, nevertheless partially confirmed a report which the agent FRS had delivered in January of clandestine warship construction for the Austro-Hungarian navy, which had provoked great interest in the Admiralty and which Bethell asserted was the best job of intelligence work done ‘since he came to the office’. Possibly